Replaced "Make Pane Undockable" and "Make Pane Group Undockable" actions in pane group and pane tab context menus with "Undock Pane" and "Undock Pane Group" respectively; the previous behavior can be accomplished by holding the ControlModifier when clicking the action

Added "Make Pane Dockable" and "Make Pane Group Dockable" actions to pane group tab bar and pane tab context menus when a pane (group) is in an undockable state

Fixed an issue where the order of panes in a pane group were reversed when the pane group was made undockable

Fixed an issue where the Add Pane (Tab) submenu of the pane group tool bar context menu did not list available panes in the same order as Window > Panes (Tabs); entries were being sorted case-sensitive but should have been sorted case-insensitive

Undocking a pane group (or a pane) now ensures that the undocked pane group will be of a size that fits on the screen that the pane group (or pane) was on when it was docked and that the undocked pane group will be centered on that screen

Making a pane group (or a pane) undockable now ensures that the dialog will be of a size that fits on the screen that the pane group (or pane) was on when it was docked and that the dialog will be centered on that screen

Making an undockable pane group (or a pane) dockable now ensures that the undocked pane group will be of a size that fits on the screen that the dialog was on and that the undocked pane group will be centered on that screen

PowerPose pane

Improved overall performance

Now prefers a figure's base template set over a template set defined by the default Template Suite

Added a "Template Set" drop-down above the point selector widget

Added a "Template" drop-down above the point selector widget that provides a list of templates in the set for a given figure/geometry

No longer blocks interaction with the UI while waiting for responses from the database

Displays "Filtering..." feedback (in the footer) while busy

Fixed an issue where starting a Product filter while one was already working could cause no results to be displayed

Improved responsiveness

Clicks within a Category View while the database is busy no longer causes each click to be queued, only the last click is queued

Content Library pane

Fixed a potential crash when saving presets

Align pane

Added "Key Node" indication

The “Key Node” (first selected node) is the node that modifications of all other nodes is based on, except when the “To Grid” option is active for any "Align" operations - in which case the grid is the key

Added "End Node" indication

The "End Node" (last selected node) is the node that defines the end of the range for "Distribute" operations

Improved performance; updates only occur when the pane is visible

Geometry Editor Tool

Fixed #DS-1562: Surface groups get scrambled when the Delete Unused Vertices action (context menu) is used

File Loading

Fixed an issue with resolving image file paths

was causing missing '[' or '{' log messages

was causing slow down

Fixed an issue with reading subdivision edge/vertex weights from file

Fixed an issue with auto-projected morphs not applying on load

File Saving

Fixed #DS-1568: Wearable(s) Preset was not writing material images for the target

Auto-Follow Properties

Fixed an issue where properties were being set 'hidden' instead of 'dynamically hidden'

caused properties to be marked as modified and therefore to be saved in scene files

Scripting

Many API additions and/or resolved issues in various areas; see the Change Log for more detail

Fixed bugs and/or made improvements in various areas; see the Change Log for more detail

Important Notes:

!! IF YOU HAVE NOT UPGRADED TO THE 4.9 GENERAL RELEASE, IT IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED THAT YOU BACKUP YOUR CONTENT DATABASE IN DAZ STUDIO 4.x BEFORE LAUNCHING THIS VERSION !!

The first time you launch Daz Studio 4.9+, any data that exists in the content database is migrated so that it can be used in Daz Studio 4.9+.

The amount of time the database migration operation takes is proportional to the amount of data to be migrated.

The database migration operation does not delete the data that it migrates from the previous location so that it remains accessible by earlier versions and other applications, such as Carrara.

Daz Studio 4.9+ uses the same PostgreSQL database as Daz Studio 4.6 and later, and/or other applications, such as Carrara.

A portion of the data contained within the database is shared amongst versions but not entirely. For example:

Creating a category in either Daz Studio 4.9+ or 4.8 will cause that category to exist in the other version

Assigning a file to that category in Daz Studio 4.9+ will NOT cause that file to be assigned to that category in Daz Studio 4.8

Assigning a file to that category in Daz Studio 4.8 WILL cause the file to be assigned to the category in Daz Studio 4.9+

Reseting the database in any version of Daz Studio that uses PostgreSQL (e.g., 4.6 or later) will purge all of data in the database, including any data that may be used by earlier versions or other applications, such as Carrara.

After the initial migration operation, edited metadata in Daz Studio 4.8 will not be migrated to Daz Studio 4.9+.

A workaround is to export User Data from Daz Studio 4.8 and reimport User Data in Daz Studio 4.9+.

Comments

Has the NVIDIA Iray renderer been updated?

Yes, it has.

*Note:The entries below come directly from the NVIDIA Iray 2017.0.1 release notes. Some entries, such as the mention of Iray Realtime, Linux, etc, currently have no bearing on Daz Studio itself but are included for completeness.

Iray 2017.0.1, build 287000.7672

Added and Changed Features

General

Support for more professional GPUs to be eligible for a professional license has been added.

Fixed Bugs

General

Incorrect derivatives of triangle meshes if only points have been changed have been fixed.

An incorrect startup message (wrong DLL name) on Windows has been fixed.

The API example for stereo rendering has been fixed (left and right eye were swapped).

Iray Photoreal

df::rounded_corner_normal with "across_materials" could have behaved incorrectly if the same material instance was used on different geometry instances and if the material used state::object_id or state::transform_* functions. This has been fixed.

Iray Interactive

The camera attribute "mip_lens_radius" now defaults to 2.0 as documented. Bug #18337.

Expressions like "base::flake_noise_texture() {+,*,-,/} value" might have been interpreted incorrectly by the material converter. This has been fixed. Bug #18340.

Material Definition Language (MDL)

Fixed incorrectly issued warning from the MDL compiler if an MDL module imports another MDL module from the same archive.

Cloning scene elements with projectors did not copy the potential projector properly. This has been fixed. Bug #18194.

The error reporting when dealing with projectors has been improved. Bug #18162.

An update problem with active projector changes has been fixed. When the active projector attribute was removed, the corresponding update failed under certain circumstances for both Iray photoreal and Iray interactive. Bug #18222.

The .mi export of the active projector attribute has been improved. Prior to this, it was exported only on certain scene elements. Now it gets handled uniformly on all scene elements.

The incorrect bounding box of geometry scene elements if only points have been changed has been fixed.

The .mi export of empty attributes of type Ref[] was broken and resulted in syntax errors in the exported .mi file. This has been fixed. Bug #18309.

Storing measured BSDF data verbatim in .mi was only reading/writing it partially. This has been fixed. Bug #18238.

When disabled, certain changes on section objects in a scene update were not considered by both Iray Photoreal and Iray Interactive. This has been fixed. Bug #18296

Editing geometry directly could result in invalid bounding boxes. This has been fixed. Bug #18171.

When invalid scene data - for instance as part of an array of references - was given, the update handling was sometimes inadvertently trying to access it. This invalid access has been fixed. Bug #18310.

An occasional crash after a web socket has been destroyed has been fixed.

Iray Bridge

A bug has been fixed where the underlying data streams were not closed properly when closing video streams of a Cloud render context until the render context itself was destroyed. The bug was triggered when switching back and forth between dual layer stereo and mono rendering. Bug #289479.

A rare deadlock has been fixed that could happen when closing a Cloud render context. Bug #289468.

*Note:This is a beta release of Iray 2017. This is meant for early evaluation and integration prototypes. Do not use this for production code. Please see the list of known bugs and restrictions below. Please always read the release notes with each release carefully because they will describe interface changes when appropriate.

Known Issues and Restrictions

General

The additional attributes enable decals and disable decals are not working as expected and should not be used. Bug #18144.

The removal of section objects is not fully supported yet. Bug #18173.

Iray Interactive

Interactive changes to the additional active projector attribute do not always show up. Bug #18180.

Added and Changed Features

General

Two new types of scene elements IProjector and ISection object have been added.

Timestamps in log messages have been changed to include now the time zone offset.

Timestamps in HTTP headers have been changed to conform to RFC 2616.

Support for AxF 1.4 has been added.

The Fermi GPU architecture (compute capability 2.x) has been marked as deprecated and will be removed in the next release (2017.1, to match the requirement inherited from the CUDA toolkit and accompanying driver releases).

Support for exporting in-memory lightprofiles has been added.

Support for exporting lightprofiles without a filename by exporting them to a file next to the scene file has been added.

Iray Photoreal & Iray Interactive

An error message is now being printed if a light path expression (LPE) cannot capture any path, for example "(L D E) & (L G E)".

Section objects are now supported.

Projector functions are now available in the scene graph to provide procedurally generated UVWs, independent of decals.

Iray Photoreal

Light sampling has been improved, leading to improved convergence speed in scene setups that feature many (finite) light sources.

Motion blur performance when the instancing scene option is set to "auto" has been improved.

The convergence behavior if the firefly filter is enabled and/or the nominal luminance parameter is specified has been tweaked, resulting in (usually) increased convergence speed. Note that this unfortunately increases the time-per-iteration, but will also improve the light transport simulation precision if the firefly filter is enabled as this can result in brighter images due to less harsh filtering that is needed then.

Support for cutout opacity and base layer normal/bump maps to the auxiliary buffer outputs has been added.

The "environment_dome_ground_connect_from_camera" option and the "matte_connect_from_camera" attribute have been added to be able to control the behavior of the matte object backplate or environment texture lookup: If set to true the lookup will be done locally. Similar secondary interactions with the matte object will result in the exact same lookup for these if set to false globally. The lookup will always be done based on the true secondary simulation interactions.

Preliminary support for geometry/3D backplates via the "backplate_mesh" attribute has been added. Correct interaction with matte objects including the dome ground plane is still missing in this beta.

The architectural sampler has been marked as deprecated and will be removed in the next release (2017.1).

Iray Interactive

Subsurface Scattering support has been added.

Support for 3D backplate objects via the "backplate mesh" attribute has been added.

Support for 2-layered canvas when using single pass stereo rendering has been added.

Support for the render context option batch update interval has been added.

Support for all CUDA compute capabilities on MacOS has been enabled.

The limit on the amount of overall (finite) light sources has been removed.

Flux correction for EDFs with global distribution on finite lights has been implemented.

Light profile support for directly visible emissive geometry has been added.

Support for section plane objects defined in the scene graph has been added.

Material Definition Language (MDL)

The new methods IMdl_factory::create_mdl_texture(), create_light_profile(), and create_bsdf_measurement() allow to load resources by specifying their absolute MDL file path (as if that string appears inside an MDL module). The new method IValue_resource::get_file_path() allows to retrieve the absolute MDL file path.

If a resource is loaded via an MDL module, the methods get_original_filename() on IImage, ILightprofile and IBsdf_measurement now return NULL instead of the MDL file path (since there is no original filename available, and the MDL file path is something different). The method IValue_resource::get_file_path() provides the MDL file path instead.

The MDL JIT compiler can now use the uniform MDL state from a renderer core state if supported (as is the case in Iray Photoreal). This can greatly reduce the amount of JIT generated code in scenes with a lot of material instances that differs in uniform state only.

Fixed Bugs

General

A crash that could happen if a texture file disappeared between the first access for the meta data and the second access for loading the actual pixel data has been fixed.

An Iray Bridge bug has been fixed that caused video streams to not fully close when rendering dual layer stereo in interactive or synchronous scheduler mode. This caused video streams to be assigned with less and less bandwidth.

The export of multiple texture spaces could have caused a crash of the .mi exporter. This has been fixed. Bug #18118.

Iray Photoreal & Iray Interactive

A bug causing an inconsistent mapping of box domes when seen from outside has been fixed.

MDL state::transform_normal was incorrectly implemented for non-orthonormal transformations. This has been fixed.

Iray Photoreal

Incorrect handling of overlapping objects in the IOR stack has been fixed.

The unintended behavior (differing backplate or environment texture lookup) of the "matte_connect_to_environment" attribute has been fixed. Bug #18075.

A crash has been fixed that could occur when assigning an invalid light profile.

In some rare cases crashes were seen when objects were moved around or when rendering was restarted. This has been fixed. Bug #18146.

Iray Interactive

Objects and lights were marked as not visible to be visible to picking. This has been fixed. Bugs #17749 and #17824.

The geometry disappeared when the camera was set outside of a box environment dome. This has been fixed. Bug #17950

A bug caused a wrong combination of a material ’geometry’ normal map with a BSDF normal map. Bug #18109

Glossy ground reflections disappear when enabling Path-Space Filtering. This has been fixed.

A wrong number of available render context options was reported.

The Iray Interactive library failed to load on MacOS.

Spherical environment domes occluded objects when the geometry overlapped the sphere and was seen from outside.

Network rendering striping when rendering multiple LPEs has been fixed.

Global illumination brightness bugs have been fixed.

Incorrect per layer bump processing if the layer bump is the same as the main material bump has been fixed. Bug #18110

A limitation has been fixed that caused shadows on the virtual ground plane to be ignored after 2 or more reflections/refractions.

Material Definition Language (MDL)

The MDL specification states that there is no implicit conversion from scalar to vector type, nor from float to color. Nevertheless the MDL core compiler allowed such code. Now the compiler produces a warning in non-strict mode and an error in strict mode. Future MDL versions will forbid this construct, hence all wrong code must be updated.

When the types of the range expressions are adapted to the type of the annotated entity, the definition of the annotation is now updated.
Example:
float p [[ range(1, 2) ]]
now uses the range(float, float) overload, because 1 and 2 were promoted to float. Before, range(int, int) was used, because the annotation overload resolution found that for int, int arguments before these got promoted to float.

A crash inside the Iray Photoreal processing of non-folded array constructors when a material instance was processed has been fixed. This happened for instance for arrays of spectrum constructors. Bug #18184.

The names of the builtin type constructor arguments have been fixed according to the MDL specification. Named parameters now work as specified by the MDL specification. Bug #18190.

Am i reading the notes correctly that "Fermi Class GPU" is now the minimum requirement? Does this mean that I will no longer be able to use my GPU (4gb geForce GTX745) for IRAY RENDERING if i upgrade to DS 4.10?

If you look at the NVIDIA Iray notes (https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2962401/#Comment_2962401), you'll also see "The Fermi GPU architecture (compute capability 2.x) has been marked as deprecated and will be removed in the next release (2017.1, to match the requirement inherited from the CUDA toolkit and accompanying driver releases)", which suggests that the next update to Iray (Daz Studio 4.11?) will require a Kepler class or newer generation GPU.

If you look at the NVIDIA Iray notes (https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2962401/#Comment_2962401), you'll also see "The Fermi GPU architecture (compute capability 2.x) has been marked as deprecated and will be removed in the next release (2017.1, to match the requirement inherited from the CUDA toolkit and accompanying driver releases)", which suggests that the next update to Iray (Daz Studio 4.11?) will require a Kepler class or newer generation GPU.

...OK I have a GT 460 (Fermi). I cannot afford a new GPU card as I am on a fixed income so what does "depreciated" mean in this sense? Can I still use dForce? Can I still use it to run the displays? Can I still render in Iray on the CPU (Nehalem i7 930) or will that be "depreciated" as well?

The only way I can afford new hardware is to have some kind of a windfall, like a lotto win.

If you look at the NVIDIA Iray notes (https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2962401/#Comment_2962401), you'll also see "The Fermi GPU architecture (compute capability 2.x) has been marked as deprecated and will be removed in the next release (2017.1, to match the requirement inherited from the CUDA toolkit and accompanying driver releases)", which suggests that the next update to Iray (Daz Studio 4.11?) will require a Kepler class or newer generation GPU.

Thank you for this info, Cris, and also a thanks for the answers to namffuak and Gordon!

(I was confused-- i thought Kepler (which my card is) was the OLDER, and FERMI the NEWER kind and was afraid I was not going to be able to go to 4.10 & try out dForce.... so, YAAAY, happy to learn that I can! )

A few quickie questions about Dforce?
1. Is there somewhere a quick description of what it is / does. I don't have the time at the moment to dive into a lenghy manual?

2. Is it for female clothes only or can it be used as well for male clothes, creature things (like a horse blanket) objects (curtains, tableloths, bed materials, flags)?

3. Does it only work with Dforce items or is it possible to use with 'older' dynamic items. (I purchased a few dynamic items when I used DAZ 3.1, where there was a dyamic engine available)

I played with the beta and am excited that it's now out for real.

2/3 It can be used on male clothes, blankets etc. and older conforming items can be converted. Both older DAZ dynamic and Poser dynamic clothing can also be converted. With all older clothes there's some risk of 'explosions' though, but on the whole it works and it's worth a try to check existing clothing/fabric/just try things (you could even do Dali-like 'melted' objects; someone did some melted people but I lost the link).

Well, that certainly makes it somewhat easier than VWD but as VWD works with older clothes, meh. Would be a game changer if it could do that plus hair.

dForce will work with older clothes (subject to requirements like physically possible and having welded mesh, but I imagien those affect VWD too). As explained in the Start here thread, you just select the clothing, apply the dForce modifier, and adjust settings/add weight maps as needed.

Rob handles the documentation, generally on his own time (in as far as he gets to have any). Obviously he and the other developers have been pretty busy preparing the new version of DS but the new information should get added to the public documentation, now that the relevant version of DS is public, as he is able.

TLDR: It's the 400 and 500 series that use the older Fermi architecture. You can still use it this release but, as always, back up your installation files "just in case".

...so what does that last statement mean? Will newer versions of Daz 4.10.x not work properly unless I buy new hardware?

Oh, and still being sent to my product page after clicking on the manual download button for the 64 bit Windows version. The only versions that show in the product ibrary listing are "4.5.1.56" (which is listed as "Inactive") and "4.x" Pro which when I click on that, I get a blank field to the right with a message that reads:

Oh, and still being sent to my product page after clicking on the manual download button for the 64 bit Windows version. The only versions that show in the product ibrary listing are "4.5.1.56" (which is listed as "Inactive") and "4.x" Pro which when I click on that, I get a blank field to the right with a message that reads:

"Select a product to get started".

I couldn't get the Manual Download to work so I used the Install Manager Ready link. Upgrade Install Manager to the latest version, click the link, then open Install Manager, Ready to Download Tab. It should be at the top.